by Dave Zornow
Statistically speaking, the Mac and the Republican leadership have alot in common.
MacDailyNews’ recent headline “Apple Mac owns 90% market share for ‘premium’ PCs costing over $1,000″ comes as quite a shock to anyone who spent the first 10 years of their Mac ownership being ridiculed by PC friends and IT departments.
I remember the day when an IT director for a progressive media company refused my request for a friendly and fuzzy early Mac so my research department could crank out something more client friendly than what was available on our IBM PS/2 running Lotus 1-2-3 and printing on a dot matrix printer. “Thou shalt not use the ‘M’ word here,” she told me.
Too bad I wasn’t working at some cutting edge cool place like MTV. Wait, come to think of it I WAS working at MTV. Which just shows you how far Mac acceptance in the marketplace has come.
But I digress from the 90 percent statistic shocker. “Nine out of 10 premium PCs purchased from US retail brick-and-mortar stores or online sites (including major chains and Apple Store) during [the] fourth quarter was a Mac,” says Joe Wilcox from BetaNews.
It’s incredible and not quite believable that the company that had a perennial sub 10 percent share of sales currently is responsible for 9 out of ten PCs sold. It’s also not quite true, either. The numbers aren’t flawed. It’s the base that’s in question.
Once upon a time, you needed to spend close to $3,000 for a state of the art PC. Every year the specs would change…but the price would be more-or-less the same. Over the last ten years things gradually changed where each time you bought a new PC you got more — literally for less. Now you can buy a middle of the market machine for less than $1000.
So it’s not so amazing that Apple dominates the $1,000 and up market. The twin shockers here are how cheap it is to buy a PC and how Apple has consistently received a premium price (for delivering, arguably, a premium product) while the margins on Windows machines have steadily declined.
This is a trick that researchers and marketers know well. If you don’t have a good story against total the total market, change the base to something that’s more relevant to the target which tells a better story.
Sometimes, researchers are called to task for “manipulating the base” to tell that better story. As it happens, politicians frequently employ the same trick although they rarely get called out for this behavior.
This week, conservatives and Republican leaders are screaming about a $3.8 trillion budget for fiscal 2011, the largest peace time budget in history. Deficits are projected to shoot up to a record $1.6 trillion this year. When the late Senator Everett Dirksen once mused “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real money,” he never could have imagined that some day we’d have a multi-trillion dollar national deficit.
But conservative leaders are doing one worse than eager researchers. By disregarding the $1.4 billion deficit Obama inherited in addition to two wars, a teetering banking system, failing automakers and soaring unemployment, they aren’t just manipulating their numbers, they are manipulating their followers, too.
Without context, Apple’s 90 percent share is impressive but meaningless. The same can be said for a deficit so huge it defies comprehension. It’s easy to say “we can’t afford a $1.6 trillion deficit.” But we couldn’t afford the wars and Medicare Prescription Drug bill that helped wiped out the surpluses at the start of the last decade.
Content is king and talking points to the base have their place. But context is the glue that holds it all together.